Anniversary: When the Einsatzgruppen began to march.

Der einsatz polizei SS.

SEPTEMBER 1, 1939
by W.H. Auden

I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade:
Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives;
The unmentionable odour of death
Offends the September night.

Accurate scholarship can
Unearth the whole offence
From Luther until now
That has driven a culture mad,
Find what occurred at Linz,
What huge imago made
A psychopathic god:
I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.

Exiled Thucydides knew
All that a speech can say
About Democracy,
And what dictators do,
The elderly rubbish they talk
To an apathetic grave;
Analysed all in his book,
The enlightenment driven away,
The habit-forming pain,
Mismanagement and grief:
We must suffer them all again.

Into this neutral air
Where blind skyscrapers use
Their full height to proclaim
The strength of Collective Man,
Each language pours its vain
Competitive excuse:
But who can live for long
In an euphoric dream;
Out of the mirror they stare,
Imperialism's face
And the international wrong.

Der einsatz polizei SS: A member of Einsatzgruppe D prepares to shoot a Jewish man in Vinnitsa, Ukrainian SSR, Soviet Union, in 1942. The photograph was inscribed: "The last Jew in Vinnitsa."

Faces along the bar
Cling to their average day:
The lights must never go out,
The music must always play,
All the conventions conspire
To make this fort assume
The furniture of home;
Lest we should see where we are,
Lost in a haunted wood,
Children afraid of the night
Who have never been happy or good.

The windiest militant trash
Important Persons shout
Is not so crude as our wish:
What mad Nijinsky wrote
About Diaghilev
Is true of the normal heart;
For the error bred in the bone
Of each woman and each man
Craves what it cannot have,
Not universal love
But to be loved alone.

From the conservative dark
Into the ethical life
The dense commuters come,
Repeating their morning vow;
'I will be true to the wife,
I'll concentrate more on my work,'
And helpless governors wake
To resume their compulsory game:
Who can release them now,
Who can reach the dead,
Who can speak for the dumb?

All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky:
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.

Der einsatz polizei SS: An execution of Poles by an Einsatzgruppe in Leszno, October 1939

Defenseless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.

I present Auden's poem here ironically. Auden wrote this poem from the safety of the United States, having left his native Britain when he saw war was coming. This caused him later to be condemned as a coward by his fellow countrymen. He stayed in the United States the entire war.

It is ironic, too, because I want to get across the point that "einsatz polizei" ("special police") who travel around at government orders in "Einsatzgruppen" ("special groups") are not stopped by ineffectual, effete poets, but by determined men with firearms and the guts to use them, who show their "affirming flames" in muzzle flashes.

Einsatz polizei are not just a faded memory from a forgotten war, however. When American administrations try hard enough, they can achieve einsatzgruppen actions too. And no one has yet held them to account. Here's an American government einsatzgruppe at work.

Der einsatz polizei FBI, 19 April 1993.

And the people who did this and who covered it up are now back in power -- at the highest levels.

Two questions.

Do you think they've learned their lesson when they didn't pay a price the first time?

Do you get the point?

Mike
III